There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

All the books that were being published by African-American guys were saying 'screw whitey', or some variation of that. Not the scholars but the pop books. And the other thing they said was, 'You have to confront the oppressor.' I understand that. But you don't have to look at the world through his eyes. I'm not a stereotype; I'm not somebody else's version of who I am. And so when people said at that time black is beautiful – yeah? Of course. Who said it wasn't? So I was trying to say, in The Bluest Eye, wait a minute. Guys. There was a time when black wasn't beautiful. And you hurt.

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.

There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.